configured-mail-sender 2.0.0

Simplfy sending email to arbitrary domains

Table of Contents

• Configured Mail Sender

  • Overview

  • How It Works

• send_email Command

• Email Builder

Configured Mail Sender

Overview

There are multitudinous Python packages for sending emails with widely varying interfaces. Some concentrate on constructing the email message, others concentrate on the delivery. But virtually all require the caller to have explicit knowledge of how the email will be delivered. Typically the caller needs to know at least:

• The address and port for the SMTP server. (The fact that servers may have different connection encryption schems is generally ignored.)

• The sending email address.

• Login name for the smtp server, if different from the sender’s address.

• Login credentials, typically password.

All the above vary by sending email address of course. This of course puts the onus on the email package user to maintain the above for each potential sender. And for password (or other protocol-specific authentication values), they need to be protected in some way, at least readable only by the user.

And, of course, they don’t support more secure authentication systems like Google’s OAuth2.

With configured_email_sender, the application only needs to know the sending email address. configured_email_sender uses combine-settings to find all it needs to deliver the mail. Public settings, e.g, SMTP address and port can be public for the whole site. Private information (passwords) should be readable only by the user.

How It Works

configured_mail_sender makes it easy for a Python script to send emails on behalf of a user without dealing with the details of interaction with the sending email provider. Your script only needs to know the sending email address. create_sender() uses configuration files (system-wide or user-specific) to figure out how to communicate with the sender’s email domain.

The sending Python script creates a MailSender object for the sending email address. It can then construct emails in the form of Mime objects and use the MailSender object to send them.

Here’s a simple example:

import configured_mail_sender
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

sender = configured_mail_sender.create_sender('[e-mail]')
msg = MIMEText("This is a test message", 'plain')
msg['Subject'] = 'Success!'
msg['To'] = '[e-mail]'
msg['Cc'] = ['[e-mail]', '[e-mail]']
msg['Bcc'] = '[e-mail]'

sender.send_message(msg)

See the DOCUMENTATION for details on how to configure configured_mail_sender.

send_email Command

This package also provides a send_email command that lets you send a simple email message from the command line. This can be handy to, for example, send a notification when your system reboots or detects some kind of anomaly. The command exposes most of the capabilities of configured_mail_sender. Here’s a simple example:

send_email --from [e-mail] --subject 'This is the subject' And this is the message

Will send an email from me@ to you@, with subject “This is the subject” and a message body of “And this is the message”.

See the detailed documentation for more.

Email Builder

And finally, the package provileds email_builder, a class that simplifies building a MimeMultipart message including attachments.

At a high level you’d use email_builder like this:

ebuilder = configured_mail_sender.email_builder.EmailBuilder()
# Call methods (see below) to construct the email
# A very simple example:
ebuilder.subject('This is a sample email')
ebuilder.to('[e-mail]')
ebuilder.message('Here's a message with a pdf attachment.')
ebuilder.attach_file('a_pdf_file.pdf')

# Now, send the email.
sender = configured_mail_sender.create_sender('sender@somewhere_else.com')
sender.send_message(ebuilder.email)

That’s it. See the detailed documentation for specifics.